Do you worry you may have Celiac?

Unlock your 23andMe health report.

On average it takes anywhere from 6 to 10 years for someone with Celiac Disease to be diagnosed. For some reason doctors don’t catch it. The disease has many symptoms that mimic other issues like IBS. A drug will fix IBS so that seems to be their go to but this misdiagnoses leads to long term damage of the patients small intestine making themunable to absorb any vitamins from their food and their condition slowly worsens.

You will often see people have started to diagnose themselves with Celiac making it harder for the professionals to do so as once gluten has been taken out of the diet the doctor can’t test for it. You have to start eating a lot of gluten to test your blood hence making true Celiac sufferers very sick and most give up. This leaves them in a grey area, they have never been formally diagnosed.

Well good news if you have done 23andMe lately and opted for the health report you can find out if it is genetically possible for you to be a carrier of the Celiac gene and also if you have a chance of developing it as we are born with the gene but we are not all born with the disease.

Most Celiac patients have the HLA DQ2.5 which is confirmed by SNP rs2187668, though this gene is fairly common among Europeans so again having this does not mean that you have Celiac but it is possible you could develop it in your lifetime; please seek medical advice.

Here is how you unlock your data and find out if you could possible get Celiac Disease:

Step One: Log into your 23 and me account (You must be signed in for the link to work).

I come from a family of six children, of the six, four of us have Celiac Disease. When my sisters were diagnosed in the 1970’s in Ireland the doctor at the time informed my mother (lucky for us she is a nurse) that two or more of her children would likely develop Celiac, he was correct, four of us have Celiac Disease. Since our diagnoses our first cousins, nieces and nephews also have the been diagnosed with the disease.

They have found genes that will tell you if your siblings have a higher risk of also developing the disease.